Joe Pernice Happily Returns to Recording After Writing Novel

Posted on Jun 11th 2010 2:00PM by Eric R. Danton
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Having taken a break from music to write his debut novel, 'It Feels So Good When I Stop,' Joe Pernice found he was refreshed when he returned to working on songs for the latest Pernice Brothers record, 'Goodbye, Killer.'

"I enjoyed the solitary nature of the book, but a year or nine months of solitary is just about enough for me," Pernice tells Spinner. "And I like recording -- I really love being in the studio and playing with people. It's like you were home with the flu for two weeks and then you get to go hang out with your friends."

Although he recorded an album of cover tunes as a companion piece to the book, Pernice decided at the start that he would set aside his own musical material for a while.

"That served me kind of well," he says. "I don't know if I would want to work on two projects at the same time, just because I don't have a lot of time, so to do anything halfway decent, I'm going to have really to focus on one thing at a time."

Pernice liked the distinct approaches required for writing fiction versus writing songs.

"They're really different," he says. "You go from recording on a record, which is a collaborative kind of thing, which I enjoy quite a bit, to working on a book, which is completely solitary. With the exception of a few people who were involved at different steps along the way of the manuscript, it was really a solo thing, and I liked that."

"Writing a book is really kind of portable, you can do it anywhere," he says. "There's not a lot of logistics involved. You don't have to book a tour, you don't have to do the studio time, you don't have to have all the gear, you don't have to arrange schedules. It's easy. You can do it anywhere."

In fact, Pernice says he wrote 90 percent of the book at a coffee shop down the street from his house in Toronto, which contrasts with the way he writes songs in an office in the basement of his house.

"I have this crazy hobby of restoring bicycles," he says. "I'm a bit of a freak about it, so I have my kind of shop, my typewriter and my four-track or eight-track demo machine and I kind of bounce around from one thing to the next as I work. That's when I'm thinking of things. When it's time to actually chase down a project, it's all business."

'Goodbye, Killer,' is due June 15 on Ashmont.